A few days after the Beeper team proudly announced a method that allowed users to send iMessages directly from their Android devices without weird relay servers, it stopped working. Although everyone thought that this was a result of a precaution taken by Apple, there was no statement from the company. But now Apple has finally made the expected statement.
The company had a predictable stance and said it was trying to do the right thing for its users and protect the privacy and security of their iMessages. “We have taken steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that use fraudulent credentials to access iMessage,” Apple senior PR manager Nadine Haija said in a statement. So he admitted that the company had somehow blocked the Beeper mini.
From what is understood from the statement, Apple seems to be aiming to shut down Beeper Mini, which is actually interfering with iMessage by using a specially created service to connect to it via Apple’s own push notification service. To make such outside interference a reality, Beeper had to convince Apple’s servers that it was pinging notification protocols from a real Apple device. The “fake credentials” that Apple mentioned in its statement also define these transactions.
Beeper says its process works without encryption or compromising your privacy, and the company’s documentation shows that no one but you can read the contents of your messages. However, Apple cannot confirm this and says this poses a risk to users and the people they chat with.
Of course, it would be helpful to take a broader look here and remember that Apple has made it clear many times before that it does not want to bring iMessage to Android. Although Apple recently said it would adopt the cross-platform RCS messaging protocol, we don’t know exactly how this adoption will be rolled out.
Beeper has no intention of giving up
After Apple discontinued the Beeper Mini, Beeper has been working hard to get the service back up and running. On Saturday, the company said iMessage was working again in the original Beeper Cloud app, but Beeper Mini still wasn’t working. Founder Eric Migicovsky said on Friday that he doesn’t understand why Apple is blocking his app: “If Apple really cares about the privacy and security of its iPhone users, why would they stop a service that allows its own users to send encrypted messages to Android users instead of using unsecured SMS?”
Migicovsky says his stance hasn’t changed even after hearing Apple’s statement. He said he would be happy to share his code with Apple for a security review so that Beeper could be assured of its security practices, but then he stopped himself and hardened his stance: “But I reject this entire proposition! Because the position we started from is that iPhone users can’t talk to Android users outside of unencrypted messages.”
Beeper says SMS is fundamentally an extremely insecure system and practically any other method would be an improvement. Still, Migicovsky admits it’s understandable that Apple doesn’t want its users to leave the security of their messages to a foreign company. However, he states that there are many different methods that can be applied here without interrupting the service and that it is essential to offer this cross-platform secure messaging option.
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